Wednesday, April 15, 2009

The March 2009 analysis is still coming together, and will be along here soon. The market seems to be holding up better than the general retail economy, though the top book of the month does appear to have nudged under the 100,000-copy threshhold. That said, this is an event deserving of some wider context, which I hope to provide in later analysis here. A single item at a single benchmark isn't as important as what the entire market is doing — and I see some changes in that over the years that are worth discussing in greater depth.

(For now, just thinking about the 100,000 matter, we should recall that with this month's newsstand sales and next month's reorders, the true circulation number is indeed in the six figures — and there have been multiple months since 2000 where the top book at Diamond was just a smidge above 100k. So it's hard to say what the "lowest-selling top-selling comic book" of all time was, for whatever that label is worth. To get the top comic book of the month selling under 100k across all channels, though, we probably do have to go back to the initial newsstand sales on Famous Funnies, when not all the distributors carried it yet. But in a period in which other parts of the economy have posted comparisons with 1929, perhaps it shouldn't raise as much alarm to see 1935 enter our own conversation!)

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